Study title

These are behavioural data from experiments on children's word learning. The experiments typically assessed children from age 2 to age 4 or 5. Specifically, the projects herein assessed three questions. (1) How do children learn new senses for known words? These studies examined whether knowing one sense of a word supports 3- and 4-year-old children in learning additional senses. Specifically, we examined whether known senses constrain the guesses that children make about new word senses. (2) How do children understand the relations between word senses? for instance, do young children understand that a polysemous word like "chicken" has two meanings (animal versus meat)? Or do they mistakenly infer that "chicken" has a single vague meaning? (3) How do children learn to coin new senses? Many polysemous words can be extended in predictable ways. For example, if you know that a "wuggle" is a type of tool, then you can guess that the action of using the wuggle is called "wuggling". How does this creativity develop? We examined whether children learn rules for coining word senses by analogizing from the polysemous words that they already know.One of the most striking features of human communication is our ability to use words in flexible and creative ways: We often use the same sound to mean multiple different things. For instance, we hammer using a hammer, eat chicken that comes from a chicken, and drink from glasses that are made of glass. These flexible uses of words provide us with a vivid expressive power: we can use a word with one meaning while alluding to all the rest. But while flexibility may make language more expressive, researchers have often assumed that it also makes language harder to learn. In particular, if a word's meaning is a flexible, moving target, then how are children ever supposed to learn it in a reasonable amount of time? This has led a number of researchers to conclude that the words of an "ideal" language would be unambiguous. But in...